At first glance, Microsoft Office 365 and Google’s G-Suite appear to be highly similar productivity suites, with features and applications that are practically perfect copies of the other. However, upon closer inspection, these two competing packages have distinct differences—ones that will definitely impact your business’s budget and productivity over time.
As far as we’re concerned, Office 365 is the better choice. It’s cost-effective, intuitive, and offers a ton of powerful features compared to G-Suite plans of the same or similar pricing. Here are three solid instances that prove this:
Accessibility
Both G-Suite and Office 365 are catered towards helping businesses achieve optimal productivity. Ergo, they have applications for communication, collaboration, data management, data storage, and the like. The biggest difference is the accessibility of such applications.
Previously known as Google Apps, G-Suite has a number of cloud-based web applications such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides that allow for real-time editing and collaboration. On the other hand, Microsoft Office 365 offers similar applications that have both web and desktop versions.
What does this mean? It means that unlike G-Suite, you can use Office 365 applications even if you’re offline. You simply need to download them to your personal computer using your Office 365 subscription. While G-Suite’s web-based apps are great for real-time collaboration, the fact that they can only be accessed and used online can greatly limit productivity. The beauty of Office 365 is that you can literally work anywhere, regardless of lack of network speed or internet access.
Storage
Office 365’s ‘Business Essentials’ plan allows for 1TB of cloud storage for all users. Its counterpart in terms of structure and pricing is G-Suite’s ‘Basic’ plan, which only provides max 30GB cloud storage for use. What’s worse is that Google doesn’t allow for separate email storage, which means that your emails are also taking up part of the 30GB.
Higher G-Suite plans do allow for unlimited cloud storage, but only if there are five or more users subscribed to the plan. Otherwise, each user is restricted to 1TB—same as Office 365. So if you’re a company of five employees, you should have no problem. However, for businesses with less than five employees, this policy can make one feel short-ended.
For small businesses, 1TB of cloud storage is already a lot. But in the event that you need more, Microsoft’s extremely flexible pricing plans allow you to buy more storage on a per-user basis. For instance, you can buy additional 1GB of cloud storage for a fixed price, rather than upgrading your plan or buying another subscription.
Read The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft Office 365 Applications
Emails
As mentioned earlier, G-Suite doesn’t allow for separate email storage, which means you’d get maximum 30GB worth of email storage on their basic plan, and potentially 1TB or unlimited storage as you move up (again, depending on the number of accounts you purchase).
Meanwhile, the entry level Microsoft Office 365 plan offers 50GB worth of storage for email—and that’s on top of the 1TB cloud storage. On Office 365’s higher plans, you can get as much as 100GB worth of mail storage.
Aside from the fact that Office is undoubtedly more generous with their storage space, their email application—Microsoft Outlook—is a feature-rich program that has both online and offline versions. Unlike G-Suite, you have the option to sort and group emails on both versions. Google’s own Gmail is a considerably versatile email program, but it’s still sorely lacking compared to Outlook’s flexibility in terms of sorting, grouping, labeling, and generally managing email.
Overall, G-Suite is a pretty good productivity suite that offers great applications and features for its price. However, as far as versatility, functionality, practicality, and cost-effectiveness are concerned, Microsoft Office 365 is by far more superior.
